There is Nothing Safe about Grant Ward
by NezumiPi
Summary: The team doesn't trust Ward, but they need him. How else are they going to find out what Skye really is? (Not to mention hunting down Raina and Quinn and Hydra.) If Ward is going to be any use at all, there's something dark in him that he has to understand, has to dig out. They don't trust Ward. He doesn't trust himself. Sequel to There is Nothing Special About Grant Ward.
1. Here's to You, Mrs Robinson

**This story is the sequel to There is Nothing Special About Grant Ward. I strongly recommend you read that one before this one.**

* * *

"What did he _do_?" asked Simmons as Coulson helped Skye into the lab. She had been resting – not sleeping, since she had found it hard to fall asleep since Ward had been brought on the plane – when Coulson summoned her for some assistance with first aid.

"It's probably just a concussion," said Coulson. "And it's a more complicated story than you think."

Skye, for her part, just looked thoroughly miserable and slightly confused.

"He hit Skye?" Simmons' voice carried no hint of I-told-you-so. Instead, she sounded disappointed, as though she had held out the tiniest bit of hope for Ward and it had just been crushed.

"Because he wouldn't shoot me," said Skye, "even though I begged him."

Simmons looked to Coulson in hopes of getting a more coherent narrative. Coulson just nodded – Skye's description of events was essentially correct, if vague.

"Look here," said Simmons, flashing a penlight at Skye's eyes. "Good, now stick your tongue out." Simmons wrote something down. "Hold your hands out like you're carrying a tray and keep them there while you close your eyes." After several more tasks, Simmons pronounced the cranial nerve exam normal.

Simmons looked back at Coulson. She wanted to ask more questions about the situation and how Skye came to be injured, but it was her responsibility to focus on the task at hand. Trust Coulson. Trust the system.

"All right, Skye. Now I'd like you to spell the word 'SPRING' backwards."

"Um…G…N…I…R-"

"Good. A little slow, but otherwise fine."

"A little slow?" whined Skye playfully. "Not fair. I suck at spelling."

Simmons turned to Coulson. "You were right. It's just a mild concussion. She needs rest. And to drink plenty of fluids because that's always good advice."

"I don't think I'm going to be sleeping," said Skye, and that dark, desolate look was back in her eyes, all playfulness gone.

"What is going on here?!" Simmons was more worried and indignant than ever. If she were to guess based on the injury, Skye had been hit in the back of the head with a blunt object, certainly hard enough to cause a nasty headache, but hardly a traumatic injury. If Simmons were to guess based on Skye's demeanor and Coulson's over-controlled expression, she would have concluded something utterly terrible had transpired. Perhaps Ward had attempted to sexually assault Skye. That didn't really fit with the pattern of injuries, but it would explain the awful feelings written on Skye's face, and it would explain why Coulson was choosing to leave the situation vague – he wanted to give Skye some privacy. Well, that was reasonable. Simmons resolved to stop asking.

Coulson was kneeling down next to Skye. They were whispering back and forth. Simmons could hear snippets: "going to have to know" "putting them in danger" "don't believe him". She tried not to listen, but she had a sick feeling inside. She wished Fitz were present, not because he could have actually helped address the present situation, but because she would have felt more prepared to face this herself knowing that he was on board.

Coulson stood. "All right, then," he said, obviously concluding the conversation he had been having with Skye. "I'm going to go wake the others. Simmons, can you walk with Skye? We'll meet up by the cage door."

"Yes sir."

Skye stood on her own, looking more steady than when she had arrived in the lab. She looked at Simmons and smiled weakly. "I know it's been hard for you," she said. "After what he did to Fitz, I don't blame you for being scared of him."

"I…I…I don't know what to say to that," said Simmons because it was the only truthful sentence she could cobble together.

They made their way up the stairs and down the hallway, to find May leaning on the outer wall of the cage, somehow looking perfectly put-together despite the late hour. Moments later, Trip and Coulson arrived, both still dressed for bed.

"We've received intel," said Coulson without any preamble, "regarding the nature of Agent Skye's…origins. We don't know if it's true. It was passed on by a reliable source, but we don't know if it originated with one. This information suggests that Agent Skye may, without her knowledge or intention, become a danger to others."

Trip glanced at Skye, then back to Coulson. "You mean like brainwashing?"

"The intel is unclear. That…doesn't seem to be what it suggests, but it can't be ruled out at this time." Coulson explained the content of the message in some detail. "This is obviously disturbing, but I know I have the best people available to get to the bottom of it and solve it."

"When you say a reliable source," said May, "are you talking about Ward?"

"Yes," said Coulson with a long exhale. "Ward received this information from Raina and has been withholding it to protect Skye forces that might attack her to protect themselves from whatever…power she may have. Skye eventually persuaded him to disclose the information directly to her."

"And what makes you think he's telling the truth?" asked Triplett. "I know he used to be your guys' teammate and all, but he was lying all that time. Why stop now?"

"Because his primary motivation is gone," said Coulson. "I don't believe he was ever loyal to Hydra, only to John Garrett."

"And because he cares about me," said Skye. It was the first time she'd spoken in the meeting that was ostensibly about her. "Not in, like, a grown-up way. But in some kind of way. He really doesn't want me to get hurt. Sort of."

"That's what he wants you to think," said Simmons. "He could just be manipulating you."

"Yeah," said Skye. "Um, is anyone going to comment on the part where I might blow up and kill you all?"

Triplett shrugged. "I've handled bombs before. I mean, yeah, let's fix this thing, but I'm not going to freak out about it."

"And the part where I'm from a race of alien invaders?"

"I think we all knew that you lacked respect for others' boundaries," said May. "This just takes it a step further." There was a non-expression on her face that could very nearly be described as warm, even comforting. She had told something approaching a joke and the others were taking it as a sign that things weren't so doom-and-gloom.

"I have a second announcement to make," said Coulson, causing whatever calm had come over the team to evaporate in an instant. "Ward will be assisting the team in a very limited capacity. He will have a SHIELD tracker-"

May interrupted Coulson, a sign of how much she disapproved of this plan. "He's familiar with SHIELD technology. What happens if he removes the bracelet?"

"That's why it won't only be a bracelet. We're also going to embed the hardware into his spine. Simmons will do the surgery tomorrow. The device will be able to deliver painful feedback, knock him unconscious, or terminate him. Everyone in this room will be able to activate it as necessary. It goes, I'm sure, without saying, that these settings are only to be used in case of emergency and not as a form of revenge."

May might have looked chastised, or she might have had no expression. It was hard to tell.

"I am not asking anyone in this room to like him. I am not asking anyone in this room to forgive him. I _am_ asking all of you to work with a skilled operative regardless of your personal feelings at a time when we desperately need more people." That was all Coulson was going to say to the group. It wasn't like he could quickly explain the thought process that led him to decide that Ward was to be brought back on active duty. Semi-active duty. Parole. He knew he would get an earful from May. He looked at Simmons. She looked sad, but somewhat relieved. Maybe she had been expecting worse? Triplett seemed to be taking the whole thing in stride. And Skye looked mostly asleep.

May, Trip, and Skye shuffled back to their bunks. Simmons hung back. Coulson drew in a breath. Her objections were perhaps the most reasonable of all those he anticipated. She was quite legitimately terrified of Ward. She couldn't do her job while terrified.

"Sir, I…" Simmons swallowed. "I appreciate your faith that we can solve the puzzle of Skye's biology, but with all due respect, you no longer have the best scientists on your team. You only have one. Fitz…isn't coming back any time soon." Simmons seemed much smaller after saying that, as if admitting it cost her dearly. "And a problem like this, it would help if I could collaborate. Obviously, this has to be top-secret, but if you know of anyone who could…" She trailed off.

Coulson thought for a moment. This was not the objection he had expected, but it was nonetheless quite reasonable. He needed someone brilliant, someone expert. But also someone he could trust, someone who wouldn't be tempted to sell Skye out to the military. And someone he could contact and bring in without raising too many flags.

"You know," said Coulson, a thin smile beginning on his face, "I think I know a guy."


	2. I'd rather be a hammer than a nail

Ward awoke the way he usually did: perfectly still with eyes shut as he surveyed the situation around him. It was always better to gather information before any people in the vicinity knew he was awake. He could hear breathing other than his own and the gentle swish of pants legs passing by one another. Skye and May both wore tight pants that would make a different sound. Simmons wouldn't be in his cell. That left Coulson and Triplett as possibilities. Ward decided he could handle either of them. He opened his eyes.

"Good morning, Mr. Ward," said Coulson, smiling politely.

_Mister_ Ward. Of course he wasn't _Agent_ anymore. That would take some getting used to. He sat up and swung his feet down to the floor.

Coulson held out a sealed plastic bag containing sterile green scrub pants. "You need to shower and then get dressed."

Ward took the bag. "Just pants? No shirt?"

"No breakfast either. We're prepping you for surgery."

"Oh."

Coulson exhaled, a thin sound that wasn't quite a sigh. "Ask the question, Mr. Ward."

Ward looked perturbed. "If there's something else you want to tell me, just tell me."

"I told you we were prepping you for surgery and you don't have any questions at all?"

"Not really."

"Think it over."

Ward blinked more when he was thinking. "What…is the surgery?" he asked in a tone that suggested he was hoping his question was correct, rather than expressing a genuine desire to know the answer.

"We'll be implanting a SHIELD house arrest tracker in your spine. It will have all the essential functions which can be activated by any member of the team at their own discretion. Do you have any questions?"

Ward caught on that he was supposed to have a question, so he asked the first one that came to mind. "How long will the surgery take?"

"Four to six hours. We don't have an anesthesiologist on board, so you'll receive a mild sedative and local anesthetic. General anesthesia is too dangerous."

Ward nodded. That was fine. Thanks to his aptitude for autohypnosis (or dissociation or alone-in-the-dark or whatever you wanted to call it), enduring long, uncomfortable situations was something he was quite good at.

Coulson appeared to be waiting.

Ward tried to think of another relevant question, but nothing occurred to him. There were dozens of things he didn't know, but he didn't really expect to be told any of them.

"Ask the question, Mr. Ward."

This was odd and uncomfortable in a way that autohypnosis couldn't affect. What did he need to know right now? He didn't need to know anything. He wasn't the guy in charge. He wasn't making deci-

"What is the purpose of the device?"

Coulson looked a little relieved. Ward took this as a sign that he had asked the right question. "Behavioral control. If you do anything that threatens the safety of this team or the integrity of the mission, you will be subdued. We will _not_ be using the device for interrogation or torture."

Ward realized that he _had_ wanted that information. It wasn't like he was in a position to argue if they wanted to torture him, but the not-knowing was miserable. And now Coulson said they wouldn't. Could be lying, but he didn't lie much, especially not to his team.

"You have a choice," said Coulson. "It's not much of a choice, but it's yours to make. You can undergo the surgery and allow them to implant the tracker, or you can remain in this cell. Which do you want?"

Ward was quiet for several moments, which was unusual only because he knew exactly which option he wanted. "The surgery," he said. "I want to contribute."

* * *

Trip merged two half-empty ammo boxes to make one almost-full container. "You know Coulson better than me," he said, "but from what I've heard, this is kind of his M.O."

"Mm?" May was ticking off items on the inventory list.

"You know, being all Dumbledore, offering people second chances. I heard he did that with Romanoff."

On consideration, dragging the misguided off their paths was something of a pattern for Coulson. May nodded.

"I'm not saying this is a bad idea. I honestly don't know. But keeping Snape around, that didn't work out too well for Dumbledore."

* * *

Coulson escorted Ward, now dressed only in the sterile scrubs, down to the lab. "Do you have any plastic on your back?" SHIELD had employed some of the world's top cosmetic surgeons before it crumbled, removing or adding scars as needed to prepare operatives for undercover work. SHIELD scientists had developed innovative materials that were nearly indistinguishable from natural skin, so the fact that Ward's back looked perfectly mundane wasn't very telling.

"Yes. A few grafts."

"Do you know what type of material?"

"One of the newer editions. Cuts like skin, heals like skin. It shouldn't make a difference."

Coulson took a long look at Ward's back. "They did a good job on you. What did it look like before?"

"A lot of thin white lines." Ward didn't elaborate because it was unnecessary and because he didn't want to.

"The surgery will leave a scar. I don't know how big." Coulson opened the door to the lab and gestured for Ward to walk in. "This is your last chance to back out."

"Why are you trying to talk me of something you want me to do?"

"I want you to make a _choice_, Agent Ward. Mister Ward," Coulson corrected himself.

In response, Ward hopped up onto the lab table, draped in sterile plastic that was to be used as an operating surface. He arranged himself face down, arms resting at his sides, feet hanging uselessly off the edge. "I want this," he said.

"Actually," said Simmons, "I'm going to need you to sit up so you can take these pills before we begin. A benzodiazepine and some prophylactic antibiotics." She held out a little plastic cup of pills, then suddenly seemed to realize her proximity to Ward. She put the cup down on the table and backed away.

Ward didn't make eye contact with her, but he downed the pills dry.

* * *

"_John!"_

"_Good to see you, son."_

"_What are you doing here?" Ward hadn't seen Garrett since enrolling in Operations Academy four months ago._

"_I'm here to teach a seminar on ordnance disposal."_

"_And to check up on me."_

"_You're such a narcissist, Grant. Cheer up! Your instructors say you're doing well, and your classmates don't know who you are. That's perfect."_

_Ward nodded and said nothing. He'd never been comfortable with praise._

"_I checked with medical. You never made an appointment with the plastics."_

"_I asked around. Agent Suarez said it probably won't be necessary. They're not looking to put me on any ops where it'll matter."_

"_I told you to do it."_

"_I assumed you meant to-"_

"_You assumed. You assumed? I told you to get those marks cleaned up. Why would you fight that? You want to show them to people? Tell a little sob story and make them feel sorry for you?"_

"_No! No, of course not! Jesus, John, what do you think of me?"_

_Garrett leaned in close, pointing a finger at Ward's chest. "I think you want to be a man, but there's a weakness in you," he whispered. Then he laughed. "You ever use your scars to get laid? It doesn't work with this-" he rapped his knuckles against the metal plate under his shirt, "-but you oughta at least be able to score some pity sex out of it."_

_As it happened, Ward had managed to get laid several times since arriving at Operations. It was sort of hard not to. The facility was home to a couple hundred unattached young adults in peak physical condition. They were aggressive too, a trait which tended to be associated with being a little oversexed. Suffice it to say, the Operations medical staff weren't entirely joking when they suggested adding a steady drip of penicillin to the drinking water._

_Ward didn't exactly have a sense of himself as a physically desirable man - he'd spent five years without mirrors – nor did he really know how to talk to women. Luckily, the sort of women who attended Operations tended to be very direct in their intentions. Even Ward couldn't misinterpret, "You're hot. Want to fuck?" He lacked confidence in his sexual prowess, too, but here again, having assertive partners was an advantage. They told him what they wanted and if he screwed up once, he learned his lesson and improved. The scars were never an issue. Lots of people at Ops had marks of one kind or another – some much worse than his – and he could easily duck the issue by saying he preferred sex with the lights off._

_He wasn't sure why he hadn't gotten the surgery yet. Sometimes he would run his fingers over the scars, as if checking that they were still there. He didn't really think about how he got them, just thought about how they were there, how they were a part of him. He remembered how the marks bothered Dana, how he was always careful to beat on Dana in ways that wouldn't scar._

"_I'll talk to my SO about it tomorrow," said Ward. "I'll get it fixed."_

"_Of course you will," said Garrett, all warmth and smiles. "I knew you'd get around to it eventually."_

* * *

Skye was pretty sure that Coulson had told May to keep an eye on her, seeing as there was no reason for May to be watching her morning workout.

She still hated pull-ups with a passion, but sit-ups weren't so bad. Well, they were terrible. But they were less terrible than they could have been.

Skye counted in a quiet hiss. Somewhere in the forties, she started to struggle. Somewhere in the eighties, she stopped actually producing any sound when she counted and just mouthed the numbers instead. God, her abs hurt. It made her miss post-gunshot recovery. At least then no one expected her to do sit-ups. She went through the same mental routine every morning, arguing with herself, but never breaking rhythm. At ninety-six, she began to count out loud again. When she got to one hundred, she flopped backward with a satisfied groan.

"Now do a hundred more," said May, without looking up from her paperwork.

"No, no," said Skye, stumbling to her feet, "I do one hundred sit-ups. That's my workout routine."

"Yes," said May, "and now you're going to do one hundred more as punishment."

"Punishment? For what? I didn't ask to be some kind of alien weapon, I just-"

May fixed Skye with a piercing gaze. "You will never, never attempt suicide again."

* * *

"The surgery went without incident, sir. The patient is resting in his bunk. Well, a bunk. Is it his? I suppose we should assign him one, under the circumstances, but-"

"Agent Simmons," said Coulson, "I would like to introduce you to the scientist who will be working with you on our xenobiology problem." He indicated an unassuming man sitting in the corner of the office, reading a magazine. The man wore plain brown slacks and a purple polo shirt. He had curly black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. "Dr. Banner, this is Agent Simmons. Agent Simmons, I'd like you to meet Bruce Banner."


	3. It's sleeping in my memory

"Not to second-guess the Director, but were there really no other scientists available? Ones who are less likely to flip out and smash, for example, airplanes that we are currently flying in?" Trip leaned back in the pilot's seat and looked over at his co-pilot. They really didn't need two to fly the bus, but it was always nice to have a backup. And besides, they weren't going to exactly stick Ward into the most vital roles right away. "Didn't he bust up the Helicarrier?"

"Seems like those things always get broken," said Ward. "Kind of a design flaw."

"I wouldn't call Hydra treachery a design flaw."

"I heard Banner hates the army, the whole U.S. military," said Ward, returning to the original question. "They've been hunting him for years now. And there's something with a wife or a girlfriend, maybe they killed her? …I'm not sure about the details. Point is, he'll never turn Skye over to the armed forces."

"I hear that. Balance the fuel?"

"Fuel is balanced."

"I just don't know what we're supposed to do if he gets pissed off and turns green," said Trip.

"The best idea is usually to leave the other guy alone."

Ward and Trip turned around to see an unassuming man holding a pouch of blueberries. The man popped one in his mouth before holding the pouch forward. "Want one?"

Trip recovered from the surprise before Ward did, or maybe he just had better interpersonal reflexes, because he extended his hand. "Dr. Banner. We appreciate you coming all this way to help us with this, uh…" There was no concise way to describe the problem they were facing. "My name is Antoine Triplett, and this is Grant Ward."

Ward tipped his head at Banner and made a noise that could conceivably have been 'hey'.

"Yeah, yeah, Director Coulson briefed me on personnel." Banner rocked back on his heels. He looked twitchy and uncomfortable in his own skin. He ate another blueberry.

"Hey," said Trip, "I didn't mean to offend you, talking about the, uh-"

"Other guy," filled in Banner. "And I'm not offended. You were being realistic. But the other guy, he's not a predator. He's doesn't destroy things for the heck of it. He'd really rather be left alone. If you just leave him be, he'll usually extend you the same courtesy."

"Hard to leave the monster alone on a plane," said Ward.

"No, I…uh, I got the full tour," said Banner. "And it looks like you guys have plenty of parachutes." He was remarkably blasé about the possibility. He ate a small handful of blueberries. "Friend of mine got me hooked on these," he added apologetically.

Trip laughed, smiled. "You are not what I thought you'd be, man."

"Yeah, I get that a lot. Hey, do you mind if I borrow your co-pilot? I need to move some equipment around."

"Be my guest."

Ward followed Banner back through the plane. He could tell the man had no combat training by the way he carried himself. He wondered if Banner had any experience with firearms. Not that Ward had any intention of letting Banner near a firefight – that would be disastrous in many ways, not least because a "Hulk" incident would make them trivially easy to find.

"I call him 'the other guy'," said Banner, "but that's not really accurate. We're not two separate people. We're really just two personas, two aspects of the same person."

"Huh," said Ward, not terribly interested in some scientist's weird identity issues.

"Did you know that there are fewer than one hundred confirmed cases of multiple personality disorder? There are a lot more who developed the condition after undergoing some ill-advised pseudo therapy like past-life regression or memory recovery, but less than one hundred people developed it completely on their own." Banner spun around so he was walking backwards. "Lucky me, right?" He turned to face forward again as he descended the spiral staircase.

"Uh-huh."

"They changed the name a few years back. It's not multiple personalities anymore. Now they call it dissociative identity disorder." Banner tipped his head to the side. "I was hoping that would get your attention. I was told you have a bit of a problem with dissociation. Coulson thought I could give you some tips."

"You needed some equipment moved?"

Banner laughed, though it was unclear why. "Yeah," he said. "Those six boxes contain components of my radio spectrometer and my quantum interface diagnostic unit, courtesy of Stark Industries of course. I need them set up and bolted down."

* * *

Coulson looked at the map again. There had been no sign of Raina since the revelation about Skye. (Possible revelation, he reminded himself. It could all be false.) Her silence could easily be coincidence. After all, it had only been a few days. Or, this was all some kind of plan and Ward had worked out a way to contact her, to warn her.

Coulson was working with less information than he was used to. There was a time when he had the full resources of SHIELD at his disposal. Now, he had four agents, a prisoner, and a civilian scientist, the latter of whom was still a bit peeved with Coulson for keeping his death a secret. He used to have massive databases that skimmed and sifted through credit cards and aerial photographs. Now, he had Skye and her laptop. He used to have nearly unlimited funds (though he was notoriously frugal in spending them), now he had whatever he could get unfrozen, which invariably fell in the hundreds or thousands, tens of thousands at best. He used to sleep well at night, even when he was holed up in enemy territory. Now, he could get eight hours and still wake up feeling exhausted.

Of course, the decline of SHIELD went hand-in-hand with the rise of Hydra. So while he was scrounging for resources, they would be spending more, consuming more. Maybe that change in spending patterns could be tracked.

* * *

"Did Garrett torture you?" Skye had managed to enter the kitchen and slouch against the fridge in a single, fluid movement.

Ward looked up from his sandwich, but he didn't answer.

"It was one of Fitz's theories. He didn't want to believe you were bad. He thought maybe Garrett tortured you to make you join Hydra."

"The only people who ever tortured me were SHIELD."

Skye had been vaguely aware of this, had even supported it, at least in the abstract. Now, with Ward sitting a few feet away from her, she felt less sanguine about it. "What did they," she asked, "what did they actually do?"

"I never did train you to resist interrogation, rookie. Though, under the present circumstances, you should probably get May or Trip to do the practical portions."

It was a weak joke and Skye did not seem amused.

"There are three main types of aggressive interrogation techniques," explained Ward. "The first is aversive sensory experiences. That includes pain and anything else that's noxious to the senses. Think loud noises, strobe lights, fingernails on a chalkboard. The second is deprivation. Take away anything that the person might draw from: food, sleep, human contact. It makes the person weak, malleable. And if you give them the thing they're lacking, a very small gift can have enormous impact. Make sense?"

It made sense. The whole idea sounded unconscionable, but it made sense. Skye nodded.

"The third element is a little harder to explain. If you're interrogating someone who doesn't want to talk, you're trying to get them to do something against their nature. So what you want to do is make them do other things that are against their nature, or convince them that they already have. If they're religious, you make them blaspheme. If they're committed to their unit, you tell them they left a man behind. If you've got a guy in custody and he's really homophobic, you smash a Viagra and mix it into his food. Then you make him watch gay porn. Lo and behold, he gets an erection. Now he's got this whole sexual identity crisis and his resolve is weakened."

"Is that what they did to you?"

"I'm not homophobic enough for that to work. I'd be more than a little surprised if I got turned on by gay porn, but I wouldn't break down."

"I mean, those three things. Is that what they did to you?"

"Well, under the circumstances, they weren't going to hold back, were they?"

Skye didn't really want to think about that. There was still a level of Spy-vs.-Spy Cold War savagery that she had never really managed to wrap her head around. Instead she said, "So Garrett did torture you."

"No, he didn't." Ward sounded a little annoyed, like Skye was a stubborn child.

"I don't know about the other things, but he definitely did the second one, the deprivation. You said it could be social isolation, right? He did that to you. And you probably didn't have food or shelter or wi-fi or stuff. God, it must have been so boring. Was it boring?"

"SHIELD focused on the third component. They tried to convince me that I allowed Garrett to kill you."

That was a really intense thought, and it implied something about Ward's feelings toward Skye that she wasn't ready to acknowledge. "You're changing the subject. You always do that when you don't like the question."

"I thought the subject was me getting interrogated. Not my favorite subject," Ward took a bite of his sandwich, "but you brought it up."

"We were talking about Garrett, and how he tortured you."

Ward shook his head. "Torture is done with a specific purpose: to break a person down. Garrett did what he did to make me stronger."

"Oh my god, you really believe that, don't you?"

Was she really _patronizing _him? "Don't you ever just shut up?" he growled.

There was a little flinch. It was small, but it was there. Skye pivoted from one leg to the other, taking a step back in the process. She sat down and she was quiet for almost a minute. Finally, she said, "Bed sheets."

"What?"

"It's not the same thing, I know it's not, but I know what it's like to not have stuff and then you get one little thing and it counts for so much. When you're in foster care, you never really have your own stuff. Everything's shared or hand-me-downs or belongs to somebody else. But this one family, the Brody's, when they got me the first thing we did was go to K-mart and I got to pick out my own bed sheets. I still remember, I got these blue ones with palm trees on them. They were sort of ugly, now that I think about it, but back then I thought they were the best thing ever."

Ward looked at Skye and almost smiled, a thin crook on one side of his mouth. He sat in silence for a while, but she'd just given him something and seeing as how he was indebted to her already, he felt obligated to return the favor. "A haircut," said Ward. "He gave me a haircut."


	4. I have squandered my resistance

Coulson watched as Banner and Simmons worked. Unlike his alter ego, Banner was a bit twitchy and standoffish, not unlike Fitz had been. Coulson knew what it had cost Simmons to accept Banner into her lab – it meant admitting that Fitz wasn't returning. The most recent news from the rehabilitation center was positive, to a point. Fitz was almost always oriented to where and when he was these days, and he was capably forming and retaining new memories. He didn't remember the days immediately before or after his injury – those were gone forever. His hands still trembled, he still got migraines, and he still tired easily, but he was actually doing better than any other patient at the facility in many ways.

He occasionally did clever little things like installing a delay timer on the light switches, so clumsy or confused patients could flip the switch and climb into bed before it got dark. They had recently tested his IQ and obtained a score of 121, at the 90th percentile. That meant he was smarter than 90 out of 100 people. Smarter than 9 out of 10. Of course, he used to be much, much smarter than that. He didn't use to be 1 in 10; he used to be 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. According to the nursing staff, Fitz didn't seem overtly depressed about his lost ability, at least not most days, but they would occasionally catch him looking at a chemical engineering paper, painstakingly trying (and failing) to model whatever substance or reaction the article described.

(And if Fitz could learn and remember now, he had to be told the circumstances of his injury. Well, maybe he didn't have to. He certainly wasn't an active-duty agent, and the truth would hurt terribly. No, no, Coulson wasn't going to go down that road. He wasn't going to run SHIELD the way Fury did. Fitz would have to be told. Eventually.)

Simmons and Banner worked well together, though. They had built or modified some sort of sensor that measured the amount of variation in quantum…something. Coulson only understood physics to a certain point, but they were making some progress. Maybe.

"Sir."

May had managed to sneak up behind him. Or, May had just walked up behind him and he was exhausted, less alert than he should have been.

"I'd like to speak with you about Ward," said May.

"I'm surprised it took you this long."

"You already knew my objections. I didn't have to say them."

"Say them anyway. Sometimes it's good for me to hear another perspective."

May rolled her eyes, but complied. "You have a habit of trying to fix people. Even Triplett noticed, and he hasn't known you for long. But keeping him here doesn't just presume he can be rehabilitated into a good man, it presumes that it can happen quickly enough to be of some use, that it can happen without some sort of major, potentially deadly regression, and that our resources aren't better spent elsewhere. And I want to remind you that your focus is a limited resource."

Practical as ever. And she wasn't wrong. They did have other personnel options, ones with no known ties to Hydra. To show he took what she said seriously, Coulson waited a few moments before asking, "You had some other concerns?"

"Yes, two issues. First, it's obvious you've told Ward to avoid myself and Simmons."

"I didn't want you to fight him," said Coulson. Given their history of sex and violence, it was a reasonable concern.

"I follow orders. You ordered us to work with him." As much as May might want to cause Ward pain, she was expert at putting the mission above all. She was a bit disappointed that Coulson thought otherwise.

"And Simmons can't do her best work when she's facing down the man who viciously attacked her."

"Simmons is stronger than you think. She needs to face her fear. Keeping Ward away from her only makes him seem more terrifying. _If_ you plan to keep Ward around, the problem is only going to get worse unless she looks Ward in the eye and realizes her boogeyman is a coward."

Coulson wasn't sure how he felt about that suggestion. Simmons could certainly overcome her fear with enough exposure to a helpless Ward, but that fear might be a useful tool should Ward turn out to have a hidden agenda. "You had a second concern?"

May sighed. "The way you're treating Ward, you're acting like you're trying to tame a wild animal. Offer it little treats and try to get it to trust you. But he's not a wild animal. He's someone else's attack dog. That strategy won't work."

"And what strategy do you propose?"

"Let him out in the field. We've been on three ops since he's joined up and you've left him back at the plane all three times. Push him harder."

"Someone has to stand guard," argued Coulson, "and running ops is what he's been doing for years, so it's hardly pushing him. Also, the less he's seen, the more likely it is that we can use him to infiltrate a Hydra base at some point in the future."

"Then push him some other way, Phil. How many _years_ did you spend taming Barton? How many did you put into Romanoff? You're the director of SHIELD. You don't have _years_ for this project."

God, Coulson was tired, but that didn't mean May was wrong. "I appreciate your input."

* * *

Simmons gestured to the unintelligible figure on the large screen. "Using Dr. Banner's expertise in quantum field theories," she said, "we've been able to take readings from Skye on a subatomic level."

May tapped a pen against the table. "And were those readings abnormal?"

Simmons pressed her lips together. "Well, no single number we obtained was abnormal, but the variability was unusual."

"You're saying these numbers normally don't change much?" asked Trip.

"In any given substance, they normally don't change at all," said Banner.

"What's particularly interesting about Skye's samples is that they only show variability while they're alive. Once the cells are dead, they collapse to a single number like normal matter. So, for example, a fresh blood sample will give different readings upon each scan, but after time has passed and the cells have died, it gives the same reading every time."

"And what does this mean in practical terms?" asked Coulson.

"I have no clue," said Simmons apologetically.

* * *

"Are you, like, super-happy to be able to hit a punching bag again?" asked Skye.

"It's nice." Ward didn't break rhythm.

"Is this your favorite punching bag? Have you named it?"

Ward didn't dignify that with a response. Instead, he asked, "Are you okay with what they said about you? The quantum…thing?"

"It's weird, I guess, but I'm not really sure what it means yet, so I'm not going to get too worked up about it."

Ward finally paused in his punching. Skye liked to describe herself as a high school dropout, but she was plenty smart. She must have understood what Banner and Simmons had been talking about. She was actually made of different _stuff_ than normal people. Ward felt that was worth getting worked up over.

"Here," said Skye, ending the awkward silence. She held out a phone and a slip of paper. "DC told me to look this up and give it to you."

Ward took the paper. It was Skye's handwriting, blue pen, and it said, "Dana Ward / Wade" followed by a phone number and an address in Vermont. "Did Coulson…give an order?"

"He just told me to find the info and pass it on to you. And that I can't leave the phone with you, so if you don't want to call him, you have to give it back." Skye tipped her head to the side as if this were some mundane chore. "I don't see why you wouldn't call him though. I mean, this is your good brother, right? Not the evil one."

What Ward really wanted was some time alone with the punching bag. Or just some time alone. Or just some time. But Skye apparently felt this had to be handled right now. Why was Coulson pushing this issue? Ward felt confident that if Coulson had wanted to make it an actual condition of his freedom, he would have said so.

Skye was still talking. "I mean, I get it. I'd be scared to talk to anyone I hadn't seen for fifteen years, but he obviously-"

"I'm not scared." And, thought Ward, you're not going to manipulate me with that obvious pop-psychology bullshit. "He's moved on with his life. It wouldn't be fair to him for me to just show up out of the blue."

"He named his kid after you."

"Well, he shouldn't have done that."

Skye shrugged. "It's a better name than Dana. For a boy, I mean. I always thought Dana was a girls' name."

This was a choice. Coulson wasn't commanding him to call Dana, but he wasn't prohibiting it either. Skye was still looking at him. This was a choice. Ward looked down at the paper. He wanted to type the address into Google maps and see what the neighborhood looked like. This was a choice. He held out his hand. "Give me the phone."

Skye handed the phone over. "I'm sorry, but somebody has to listen. I can stay here or watch you through video." They couldn't take the risk that he would pass a message on to Hydra.

"It doesn't matter," said Ward. His voice was quiet, a little lower and flatter than usual.

Skye took a few steps back, giving at least the illusion of privacy. She felt a little bad about listening in, but she couldn't deny she was curious. And it was an order from Coulson, in case Ward tried anything squirrelly.

He entered the number and held the phone to his ear. "Hello," he said, after a few seconds, "Is this Dana Wade?" A beat. "It's me. Grant." Another pause. "Grant Ward."

Ward pulled the phone away from his face and stared at it for a few seconds before he hit _Redial_.

"Don't hang up," said Ward. "This isn't a joke."

A pause.

"That's a long…I can't really…"

A pause.

"Okay, all right. Um…when you were seven, you made your First Communion and you were so nervous, you vomited afterward. And then you were worried that throwing up the Eucharist was a sin, so you made me take you to confession the next day."

A pause.

"The first book you ever read on your own was _Bridge to Terebithia _and you cried like a little girl."

A pause.

"Okay, fine. When you were nine, you wanted your birthday present wrapped the way they did on TV. And I had no idea how to wrap presents, so I stapled some newspapers to the box."

A pause.

"Yeah, it's really me."

A very long pause.

Ward sighed. "I don't know if I can. I don't have the kind of job where I can just take a vacation whenever I-"

A pause.

"I'm not working for the fucking mob, Dana!"

A pause.

Ward rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I'm…I'm on parole, okay? I'm usually not supposed to leave the state. I have to ask my parole officer."

A short pause.

"I lo- I've missed you, too."


	5. I will lay me down

_So here's where this story is at. I actually have quite a lot more written in my head, but I'm in a bit of a low period wherein all my ideas look shitty and I have no energy to write them. I apologize because I usually try to be more regular in my updates. I would also normally try to make it at least a little funny and I've just got nothing._

* * *

The plane touched down in Canada to drop off Ward, Skye, and an anonymous black van.

"You could just program the tracker to follow my route and disable me if I get off course," said Ward.

"I'm not coming along for security purposes," said Skye. "I'm coming along for moral support."

Ward sighed as Skye settled into the driver's seat. He neither wanted nor needed 'moral support'. And he hated riding along when Skye was driving because she never seemed to stop gently. A guy could get whiplash riding with Miss Slam-on-the-breaks. But he climbed into the passenger seat anyway, reminding himself that he freely chose to take this trip. Coulson had refused to order him one way or the other, so he was stuck deciding for himself whether he wanted to see his long-lost younger brother.

He didn't. But he found he wanted to decline the invitation even less. So here he was, sitting in an SUV driven by a woman who acted like the speed limit was not so much a law as a personal insult, trying not to think about what would happen when they arrived in Burlington, Vermont. It was a college town, apparently the quintessential college town, with a film festival, Ben & Jerry's plan, and a bunch of hippie bands.

"Relax," said Skye. "I know you're super-stressed about this. I don't have to come inside. I just thought you could use some company on the way there." She rifled through her purse (then swerved wildly to avoid a blue minivan). "Here," she said, "a little gift to cheer you up. I saved this from the evidence locker." She held out his mp3 player. "Besides the music, there was all this stuff that's not in English and so they were all worried it had secret Hydra messages on it, but when they actually translated it, it was just some sports announcers and stuff."

He took it, gratefully. He had developed the habit of listening to sports announcers in other languages, as a way of staying in practice with languages he didn't use very often. It was almost funny, the thought of a few loyal SHIELD linguists squinting miserably at the transcripts until they finally realized it was nothing more than a Russian boxing match.

"How come all your music is stuff from before you were born?" asked Skye, because of course she scrutinized his playlist.

"I'm older than you."

"You're not that old. Most of what you've got on there is the kind of music they play in Vietnam war montages."

"I like it."

Skye suddenly veered to the right. She was pulling into a liquor store parking lot. "You should bring a bottle of wine."

"I'm sure they already have all the alcohol they need."

"No, it's polite. It's what real, live grownups do when they visit each other's houses."

Ward frowned. "When, as an adult, have you been invited to someone else's _house_?" He emphasized the word _house_ in a way that clearly contrasted with _van_.

"Okay, maybe never," said Skye, pouting slightly, "but I've definitely seen it on TV."

They ended up with a bottle of something red which the liquor store owner described as 'dry'. This was why Ward hated wine. Any subject that could describe a liquid as 'dry' did not deserve anyone's time or attention.

"Stop squirming," said Skye.

"I'm not squirming," snapped Ward, though he was shifting position in his seat every few seconds.

"It's okay to be nervous, but I bet things are going to go great."

"I'm not nervous," Ward shot back, far too quickly.

"He invited you here, didn't he? He named his son after you, didn't he? I really think it's going to go fine."

Ward wasn't sure he wanted things to go 'fine'. He wasn't sure he wanted a loving reunion with fond reminiscence and water under the bridge. He had done some terrible things to his younger brother and he'd never exactly paid for those crimes. It didn't help that the circumstances of Dana's injury were eerily similar to the events that led Fitz to become brain damaged as well. So maybe he wanted Dana to be angry, to hate him. Or maybe he wanted Dana to forgive him, because if his own brother couldn't, who could? Or maybe he didn't even want to have this stupid visit, because what was he supposed to say? 'Hey brother, it's been a while. You've got a job and a wife and a kid. That's great. I've committed several homicides.'

"I can go in with you, if you want. We'll just tell them I'm your parole officer," Skye teased.

Ward shook his head.

"Okay, well, I'm going to try to find a Wal-Mart or something. I promised the team a supply run."

Ward nodded silently as he hopped out of the SUV. He felt something hot in his head and he couldn't remember how words worked. _This was a choice_, he reminded himself. _No one told you to do this. It was your own free choice._

The neighborhood was thickly wooded, with smooth, well-maintained sidewalks. Most of the houses were old, two or three stories, with flower or vegetable gardens growing all over the damn place. Ward scratched his back. His implant itched. He followed the sidewalk through the neighborhood until he came to a one-story house with blue paint and green shutters. There was a pair of inflatable elephants in the yard along with ivy and sunflowers. Ward reminded himself that he had successfully fought off eleven armed attackers and rang the doorbell.

A woman with brown hair and green eyes answered the door. She smiled and stepped out onto the porch. "You must be Grant," she said, closing the front door behind her. "I'm Ashleigh, of course. Dana should be home any minute. It's such a nice day out; why don't we sit on the porch? Can I get you something to drink? We've got Sprite, diet Pepsi, iced tea, lemonade, beer-"

"Just water would be great, thanks." Ward realized that he was still holding the bottle of wine. He extended it to the woman. He didn't know what he was supposed to say since he didn't know why he had purchased it in the first place, but she accepted it with a warm smile and a thank-you. Ward knew exactly why they were sitting on the porch, even though Ashleigh had managed to make the request seem innocuous. Dana must have warned her not to be alone in the house with me, thought Ward. He wasn't offended. It was nice to know that Dana still had a sense of caution.

They sat on large wooden chairs that were more trendy than comfortable.

"Where's um, the baby?" Ward felt weird calling the child by his name. "Is he taking a nap?"

"No, he's over at my parents' house. They look after him a few days a week."

Keeping me away from your son, Dana? Ward took a long sip of water. If he knew the goal of this conversation, he would have been able to play her, manipulate her, but as far as he could tell, this conversation had no goal. Ward didn't know how to talk for the sake of talking – that was Skye's area of expertise.

"I'm sure Dana doesn't talk about his family very much," offered Ward.

Ashleigh looked a bit confused, or possibly pitying. "No, he's told me all about them." She smiled. "You know how he is, never shuts up."

That wasn't the Dana that Ward knew, but it had been a very long time. People change, he reminded himself. Conversation. Just make conversation. "How did you two meet?"

"We actually went to high school together in Boston," said Ashleigh. "I asked him to the prom with me, but he was already going with another girl. A year or two later, we ran into each other, got to talking and," she shrugged, "that was that."

Ward nodded. Was that really how normal people got together? It sounded boring and awkward.

"How about you," asked Ashleigh, "do you have a girlfriend?" She glanced at his ring finger to confirm he wasn't married. "Or a boyfriend?"

"What the hell has Dana been telling you about me?" slipped out before Ward could stop it.

She laughed before her face turned serious. "He's told me what he knows, which wasn't much. You disappeared completely. He had no idea if you were dead or, or…" she trailed off, obviously unable to think of another speakable possibility. "It was terrible for him when you were gone. He doesn't expect you to stay around, but if you have to disappear again, please, at least say goodbye first."

Ward wasn't sure what to say to that. It wasn't like he could really make that promise. Coulson had the authority to throw his ass in solitary confinement for the rest of his life for any reason at all. He could very easily die in combat. He could be sent undercover, incommunicado for years at a time. Skye could explode. He was saved from lying through his teeth when a dark green sedan pulled into the driveway. A Honda, good condition. Probably new, but not a luxury car, and thank god it wasn't a Prius – this town was crawling with them. A few little dings. Ward felt that hot feeling in his head again along with something strange and unsteady. He was glad he turned down that beer.

A tall man got out of the car, pulling a pair of crutches after him, the kind that put your arm through a brace instead of balancing under the armpit. He took a few steps away from the car before he focused on the porch.

"Gwant," the man breathed, and began hobbling faster. He was surprisingly spry.

Grant stepped down from the porch to cut down on the distance. He hadn't expected Dana to be tall, maybe even taller than him. When they were only a few feet apart, Dana wrapped his arms around Grant, who ineptly returned the embrace. They had never been much of a hugging family.

"Gwant," said Dana again. He now held one of Grant's forearms in his good hand and had stepped back to look his brother up and down. "It's hawd to believe it's weally you." He furrowed his brow as if he were trying to force himself to be skeptical. "Say something that only my bwother would know."

"Maynard had a pet snake for about a month before he set it loose in the library. He never got caught for that."

"I hated that snake."

"Bet the librarians hated it too."

Dana was silent for a moment, his face unreadable, before he broke into a smile again. "I can't believe it's weally you. Come in, come in!" Dana began to walk toward the front door. "And you've met my better half, Ashleigh." He exchanged a chaste kiss with his wife.

The interior of the house was messy, with toys, books, and magazines strewn everywhere. There weren't shell casings, butterfly knives, anonymous brown paper bags, or half-empty liquor bottles. Grant wasn't sure if he had expected there to be.

Dinner was…not terrible. Actually, the food was delicious because it wasn't prison food or airplane food. The conversation was slow, but avoided outright discomfort. Grant learned about Dana's job (events planner at a local university), Ashleigh's job (nurse's aide, but hadn't taken many shifts since Grant Jr. was born), the baby's favorite toys (something called a _Yo Gabba Gabba_), and the difficulties associated with growing sunflowers in Vermont (myriad). Grant pretended that these things were interesting while Dana tactfully refrained from asking Grant about his job or where he'd been for the last fifteen years.

After the meal, the brothers went out back to the deck while Ashleigh tactfully excused herself, claiming that she had to go over to her parents' house to walk their dog.

"She weally wants us to adopt that dog," explained Dana, uncapping a beer and passing it to Grant.

"Why?"

"Her pawents are getting old; they can't take it for walks as much, especially in the winter. She's a gweat dog, don't get me wong. Big fwiendly German Shepherd, alweady housebwoken."

"So why not adopt the dog?"

Dana gave Grant an odd look, slightly disappointed, as if he had hoped the answer would have been obvious. "If we get a dog, we have to get a dog cwate. Those things still give me chills."

"Because I used to lock you in one." Sometimes Grant had just needed a place to safely leave a toddler unsupervised for a few minutes while he took a bath or used the toilet. Other times, Maynard demanded he lock up Dana as a punishment or just for kicks. A few times, just a very few times, Grant locked him in there of his own volition, because he was angry and miserable and overwhelmed and he just wanted to take one variable off the table.

Dana nodded. "Did Maynahd ever lock you in there?"

"No. Mom did, though."

"I don't wemember that."

"It was when you were a baby. She'd put you in your crib and me in the dog crates and then she'd head out to…whatever her vice was at the time."

"Ah."

"Speaking of Mom, are you in contact with her at all?"

"A little. The name change was symbolic, they know where I am. I send her pictures of Gwant Jr., a cahd or flowers on Mothers' Day. She calls maybe twice a year, usually looking for money. That's about it."

"Dad?"

"Haven't heard fwom him at all since I moved out."

"Maynard?"

"Gwant, I'm sowwy, I thought you knew."

"Knew what?"

"Maynahd's dead. He died…let's see…twelve years ago. Got into a bar fight, got cut, bled out."

No, Grant hadn't known that. It was pathetic how relieved he felt, knowing that his monster was dead. And angry, because Maynard had been dead for over a decade, and he hadn't known. If it was twelve years ago, it happened while he was living in Wyoming. Garrett probably knew, probably kept it from him.

They both lapsed into silence for several minutes, staring out at the well-trimmed lawn that faded quickly into a mess of trees and bushes.

"You're on pawole?" asked Dana, finally breaking the silence.

"Yeah."

"So you were in jail the past fifteen years?"

"No, just a few months."

Dana relaxed visibly at that. "What were you in for?" It was obvious that he hadn't asked before because he was afraid the answer might be something terrible, but a crime that merited only a few months' incarceration wasn't likely to be some horrifying admission.

"Treason," said Grant, without a trace of irony.

"You don't have to tell me."

"I really can't," said Grant. "I've done some very bad things."

"I thought as much. You look different. Hahder." Dana looked sad, but then he smiled. "Also, petty cwime wouldn't buy you that leather jacket."

"How are you so...well-adjusted?" said Grant suddenly. "You've got a wife, a kid, a house, a job! You've got a good life. How the hell did that happen?" _Is this why my life could have been, if things had gone differently?_

"Well, I wasn't always. When I was in high school, I stahted having panic attacks. It got worse as I got older. I actually developed some agowaphobia. So, I did what anybody would do."

Grant realized that he literally had no idea what that might be. Get drunk? Play baseball? Do a crossword puzzle?

"I went to thewapy, took medication, joined a suppoht gwoup. You know, the usual. It helped. I still take a medication – _Cymbalta_, I think it's called. I used to take one for the panic attacks too, but I haven't needed it for a while. I was in thewapy for years. I still see my thewapist occasionally. You know, when something comes up."

Grant gulped. That sounded awful. At SHIELD academy, they had tried to force him to talk to a therapist. After three or four sessions of near-complete stonewalling, they had agreed to make it optional and he never saw his assigned counselor again.

Dana misinterpreted Grant's expression, or maybe he was exactly correct. "I know. You hate feelings. I'm not saying it's what you should do. I'm just saying it wohked for me."

Grant took a long sip of his beer. There were fireflies blinking over the backyard. When they were kids, Dana had been too slow to catch them, so Grant would bring them to his little brother, one at a time, trapping them between the screen door and the back door. And why did that memory make him think of Fitz and Simmons, plunging into the ocean?

Grant blurted out the question that had been on his mind for weeks: "Why did you you're your son Grant?"

"A lot of weasons, I suppose." Dana set down his beer. "You could be scawy sometimes, but as I got older, I understood more of why. I wemember other things. I wemember we made that little space in the linen closet, where we would hide and you would wead to me until the flashlight wan out of battewies. And once it did, you would sing to me."

"No, I didn't." There was no way Grant Ward was going to admit to soothing a small child with song.

"Sure," said Dana, tolerantly. "But the other thing was, you just disappeared. I mean, you were at militawy school, then you came home, then you were in juvie, and then…nothing! Mom said you had been twansferred somewhere, to another pwison, but I kept calling and calling and juvie had no idea where you had been sent. And all the pwisons in the state, they didn't have you either. I even paid older boys to make the calls for me, in case the pwisons weren't taking me sewiously because I sounded young. And then the weihdest thing. Juvie stahted saying you had never been there. At fihst, they had a wecord of you, then they didn't."

Garrett must have deleted the files, Grant realized, so there would be no record of a missing inmate.

"So the best I could figure was that you had died in pwison and there was a cover-up. Maybe a guahd killed you, or you were left alone with a violent pwisoner, or you were given things to kill yourself with or something. And they didn't want to admit it happened, so they paid off Mom and Dad. That's what I thought happened." Dana picked up his beer, then set it back down again without drinking. "And for Mom and Dad, it was like you never existed. They didn't think it was a pwoblem at all, you disappeawing. Maynahd never said anything either. And I, I just didn't want to forget you. I thought naming Gwant Jr. after you would be a way to honor your memowy." Dana shrugged and gave a thin smile. "Except you're not dead."

"Inconvenient."

"No, no, not at all." Dana turned to look his brother in the eye. "I've missed you so much."


	6. Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters

(1) This chapter makes much more sense if you've read There's Nothing Special About Grant Ward, but if you haven't, go ahead and read this one anyway. I'm not going to stop you. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

(2) Also, this chapter contains brief but graphic references to sex, so use your own best judgment. Or use someone else's judgment, but please return it when you're done.

(3) This story isn't shaping up to be quite what I wanted it to be. I'm still kind of zonked and having a hard time with ideas. So it's a little more disorganized and free-form than I intended.

* * *

Ward was having a really nice dream. He was naked and so was Skye. She was riding his face, breasts bouncing, his hands on her ass. She spun around to face the other way and leaned down, her lips closing over the tip of his-

The plane hit a bump and Ward woke up.

Well, that was disappointing. He didn't have dreams like that very often and he wanted to savor them. Of course, he could still savor the images. There was a certain, puritanical ethos that claimed you shouldn't ever fantasize about someone who wasn't yours, but to the best of Ward's knowledge, literally zero men lived up to that standard. You just had to keep it under wraps when you actually interacted with the person, and Ward could do that.

He imagined his hands, tracing Skye's chest, her stomach, her ass, and he reached under the bedsheets to stroke himself. He had just managed to conjure up the sounds she had made in the dream when he felt an electric pain coursing down his arms and throbbing in his back.

The implant! Fuck. It wasn't an agonizing pain, but it sure as hell wasn't sexy. He was losing muscle control in his arms as well. Just to test the system, Ward rolled over and pressed himself against the mattress a few times experimentally. The pain and muscle rigidity spread. Apparently the only solution to this particular problem was to think unsexy thoughts until his erection subsided and to start the day off with a miserable case of blue balls.

The aching in his groin was down to an ignorable rumble when he dressed and exited his bunk. Coulson was sitting at the conference table, looking over a mix of digital and hard-copy data. "I was wondering how long it would take you to discover that particular feature of your implant," said Coulson, not looking up.

A little high-tech hazing? Fine. Ward could put up with that. "Hilarious," he said dryly.

"No," Coulson put down his coffee, "it's not. You used sex as a means to manipulate one of my agents and threatened to sexually assault another."

"No, I never-"

"_Maybe I'll just take what I want_," echoed Coulson. "Sound familiar?"

"I didn't mean-"

"I certainly hope not. But other people can't know what you're thinking, only what you say and what you do. You're responsible for the reasonably predictable consequences of the things you say. And what you said back there sounded very threatening."

The thought honestly hadn't even occurred to Ward. He hadn't meant anything about sex, specifically. He had meant that he would take her back to Garrett so she could find the monster in herself and then she would understand him and that really didn't sound any better, did it? But of course, Skye hadn't been privy to all of Raina's babbling about evolution and metamorphosis. All she saw was a man who had confessed his attraction to her, a man she had rejected and called disgusting, pointing a gun at her and threatening to take what he wanted. Ward had never been particularly good at seeing things from someone else's perspective, and he'd had incredible tunnel vision when it came to serving Garrett. He was capable of understanding how he was perceived by others, but it was slow and it was work.

"How was the visit with your brother?" asked Coulson, apparently willing to drop the subject for the time being.

"Fine, sir."

"Would you like to elaborate?"

"Not particularly, no."

"Skye told me you had nothing to say on the ride back to the Bus, either."

"There's really not a lot to be said. He and I currently occupy two very different worlds."

"But you came from the same place."

"Not exactly."

"I wanted you to remember that you were loyal to someone before you were loyal to Garrett." Coulson took a slow sip of his coffee. "And that someone was loyal to you."

There wasn't much Ward could say to that. His loyalty to his brother had obviously been less than complete. Surely Coulson knew that. He had been weak.

"If you'd like to contact any other members of your family, or see your brother again, arrangements can be made. Skye can track them down." Coulson looked Ward in the eye. "You existed before Garrett."

That was a very uncomfortable thought for Ward. He swallowed.

"I have another assignment for you," said Coulson. "Someone has to do it and no one wants to. It doesn't have to be done immediately, but at this point I think we're all putting it off."

* * *

"You never talk about your sister," said Skye. If she'd had a purse, she would have reflexively held it a little tighter. This was a bad neighborhood.

"Half-sister."

"Whatever. You still never talk about her."

"I don't talk much about any of my family," argued Ward, reasonably. Skye didn't seem satisfied with this answer, so he added, "She escaped the family when she turned eighteen. She's fourteen years older than me. I barely remember her. She left when I was four."

"So why did you want to come see her?"

"A question of loyalty," said Ward, ambiguously.

The apartment building was clearly in ill-repair. The paint was peeling, the stair rails were loose or absent, and the outer door - which was supposed to be locked - was propped open with a case of expired cat food. Ward had a sinking feeling as he made his way up six flights of stairs. A question of loyalty. He felt angry for no particular reason.

Apartment 634. There was no name on the door. Didn't matter. She wasn't even Andrea anymore. She was some woman named Sarah Burgess and he hadn't seen her in twenty-seven years.

Ward glanced silently back at Skye and knocked. The door bounced back and forth by about an inch. A voice from within called, "Who is it?"

"Ward. Grant Ward."

He could hear the deep rumbling, scraping noise of something heavy being pushed aside, before the door swung open to reveal an overly-thin woman with long dark hair. She had tight, too-small clothes and dramatic makeup, a look that blended aggressive sexuality with childish apprehension and vulnerability. It was a look Ward had seen often enough when he was running undercover ops in strip clubs and brothels. Garrett had called it the "daddy issues special".

The unit didn't really deserve to be called an apartment. There was a small bathroom off to one side. There was a mattress on the floor beside an old television. The kitchenette took up most of one wall and gave off an odor of burning and disinfectant. There was a wooden dresser next to the entrance – the most substantial piece of furniture in the room – that was scuffed from being shoved back and forth across the doorway. The clothes were mostly filthy. There were beer cans and pill bottles. There were papers in unruly stacks on the floor.

The woman, _Sarah_, looked at Grant with none of Dana's reasonable skepticism. Instead, she fell against his chest crying with a practiced familiarity that suggested she spent quite a lot of time collapsing in tears.

"I never…" She shuddered. "I never thought I'd see you again."

While Ward made a vague attempt to raise at least one of his arms and curve it around the woman's back in what he imagined was a pretty good semblance of a hug, Skye glanced around for some tissues. Not finding any, she grabbed some toilet paper and offered it to the woman. She took it, gratefully, and finally detached from Ward.

The woman turned to her stacks and began shuffling through them. "Is this your girlfriend, Grant?"

"No," said Skye quickly, before Ward could answer. "We work together."

"Oh, she's very pretty." She glanced up at Ward. "You got very tall."

"Yeah. That's what happens after several decades."

"You can sit down if you like. I don't really have chairs in here."

"Great," muttered Ward.

Skye dropped to the floor cross-legged, used to a certain level of scrounging poverty. Ward opted to remain standing, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other.

Skye tried to put on a happy face. "So you knew Grant when he was a baby? Was he cute back then?" She put on a teasing, mock-whisper. "Because it's been all downhill since."

"Oh, he was so sweet," said Sarah. She finally found what she was looking for in her stack of papers: a faded Polaroid photograph of a brown-haired toddler inspecting a caterpillar. "See? He wasn't like the rest of them. He was a good boy."

Ward elected to ignore the photograph and the teasing that it would inevitably lead to. "Someone forced open your door," he said to Sarah, pointing to the broken door frame.

Sarah seemed to shrink back into herself. She looked sheepish and guilty. "I…have bad taste in boyfriends."

"Of course you do," muttered Ward.

"An ex did this?" asked Skye sympathetically.

Sarah nodded. "I've been trying to get it fixed, but the landlord never returns my calls and he's going to charge me for it anyway and-" She stopped as if interrupted and sighed heavily. "I need a cigarette. They won't let us smoke inside." With that, she stepped out, leaving Ward and Skye alone in the apartment.

Ward exhaled loudly. "Well, this was a waste of time."

"You're being kind of a dick to her. I get that you're mad, but-"

"I'm not mad at her. I just don't enjoy hanging around filthy rat holes and with people who waste my time."

Skye, having no real respect for others' privacy, was shifting through Sarah's stacks of papers. "You should go easy on her. There's a bunch of hospital discharge papers in here. She's sick."

"Then maybe she should quit smoking."

Skye held up a check stub. "Social Security Disability," she said. "SPM."

"Am I supposed to know what that means?"

"It means severely and persistently mentally ill. The hospital stays are in psych wards."

"How the hell do you know about crazy people social security?"

"The Rising Tide took all kinds."

Ward sighed again. He had noticed the pill bottles and recognized a few of the names. Psychiatric medications. Strong ones. And maybe he had a vague memory of struggling to wake her up after she swallowed everything in the medicine cabinet. And maybe he had some other memories that never made much sense when he was a boy: memories of her room as a terrible, forbidding place, memories of her holding a fat white stick and crying that God would never forgive her, memories of his father pulling her in to sit next to him with eyes and voice made Grant think of the word _devour_.

"She shouldn't be living here if she's got a violent ex-boyfriend after her," said Ward, focusing on the practical. "She should be somewhere with a doorman."

"I don't think that's going to happen on Social Security income."

"I have money," said Ward quickly. "I have eight or nine thousand dollars in savings. That should be enough to get her someplace safe for at least six months. By that time, we'll have found something more permanent."

"I think it's really nice you want to help her," said Skye, "but you don't have any money. When you were arrested, your assets were seized."

"So unfreeze my accounts."

"They weren't seized by us. Any SHIELD agent found to have ties to Hydra was subject to international law. I think Interpol was the one who actually got everyone's money."

Ward pressed his fingers against his closed eyes. He honestly hadn't thought at all about his savings, but of course it was gone. Of course Andr- no, Sarah – was in this fucking mess and of course he couldn't do anything about it.

"I do have a little money," said Skye. "Not enough to get her a new apartment, but enough that we could fix the door."

"After this," said Ward, "I need to you find one more person for me. His name is Kenneth Ward, date of birth is-"

"No." Skye shook her head.

"Why not?"

"That's your dad, right? Because you look like you want to kill him."

"Maybe he deserves to die."

"Maybe he does. But maybe you shouldn't be the one to make those decisions." She put a hand on Ward's shoulder. "I'm going to go to the hardware store and get stuff to fix the door. Spend some time with your sister. She obviously loved you even if- I think it's possible to love someone and still do wrong by them."

And then Grant was alone with his thoughts in the little room. He sat down on the mattress, picked up the photograph of himself, and tried to remember being that small.

The door swung open. Sarah had returned before Skye. She sat down beside him, leaning against his shoulder. "You seem okay," she said. "You seem like you're okay."

"Yeah," said Ward, out of habit more than anything else, "I'm fine."

"I'm so sorry," she whispered, "I'm so sorry I left you behind. I thought of you every day. Did they hurt you?"

"Some," said Ward, because there was no way he could plausibly say otherwise. Lying was so easy, so reflexive, but that didn't mean it was the wrong thing to do. "And it got to me for a while, but I did what anybody would do. I saw a therapist, took medication, went to a support group. Things got better. Life worked out for me. So please don't feel bad. You did everything you could."

And if that was all bullshit, well, it wasn't like the truth was going to help anyone.


	7. I've come to talk with you again

After fixing the door, adding a deadbolt, and giving Susan an impromptu lesson in the proper use of pepper spray, Skye and Ward left the tiny, filthy apartment. Ward even hugged his sister with what looked like genuine affection as they departed. They made it down three flights of stairs before Ward suddenly turned and began punching the wall.

"Ward! What the hell! Stop that!"

Ward didn't even seem to have heard her. He punched the bare concrete again, his knuckles beginning to bleed.

"I'm fucking serious, Ward. If you don't stop, I'm going to turn on your little mind control zapper." Skye was reaching into her pocket to pull out the controller.

Ward drew back his fist to hit the wall again, but he gritted his teeth and lowered his arm, lips pressed together in a surly display of effortful self-control. "Let's go," he said, and started walking down the stairs again.

"Wait!"

Ward obediently stopped.

"Come here. Let me take a look at your hand."

He slowly turned and trudged back up the stairs to where Skye stood. "What's that going to accomplish? You have no medical training."

She looked at him and sat down on the step, clearly inviting him to do the same. He rolled his eyes, but took a seat. They sat in silence for several minutes – Ward was impressed by Skye's self-control.

Finally, Ward spoke. "I used to pretend that she was my mother."

Skye thought about Grant's age relative to his half-sister's. "Maybe she is."

"No. She has blue eyes. So does my father. I have brown eyes. It's one of those genetics things." Ward shook his head. "It was just…pretend."

"I had a pretend mother when I was a little kid, too. I made her cards for Mother's Day and I made myself gifts from her for my birthday. It made me feel better."

He looked at her, brow drawn. "That's…sad." His tone wasn't mocking, though it was a pale imitation of sympathy.

"Some sad stuff, but I think I've had a pretty good life, all in all," said Skye.

"You know that thing in TV, where the main character realizes that their dark secret, their fear isn't true? They find out they couldn't have stopped that car crash. They find out that the spouse they think is cheating on them is really planning a surprise party. They find out that person they thought was going to reject them actually loves them. And there's dramatic music. You know what I'm talking about?"

This was the most Ward had ever said at once about anything non-mission-related. Skye just nodded.

"Garrett. He used to say I was weak, that a lot of things happened because I was weak. If this were TV, I'd be finding out that wasn't true. But it's not TV. She didn't take me with her because I was a liability. Because she couldn't bear much weight and I was too much for her to carry. And even now, I should be able to take care of her, and I can't."

Skye wasn't sure what to say to that. She still really didn't understand the dynamic between Ward and his sister, or what their household had been like all those years ago. So she stuck with what she knew. "All the stuff Garrett said, he's like a horoscope, you know? Like, they say a bunch of stuff and some of it might be true by chance, but that doesn't mean the guy writing the horoscope actually knew what he was talking about. It just means that if you say enough crap, some of it might be true. I don't know what things were like with your sister and I have no idea why she did the stuff she did. I think she loved you and I think she's a really sick person. And I think if you were weak when you were four years old, that kind of comes with the territory."

Skye paused and looked for a reaction. Ward looked distant, but he was listening.

She went on. "But Garrett didn't know your sister either, did he? So he doesn't know crap either. He just said a bunch of stuff to make you the kind of person who would follow his orders. He didn't care if the things he said were true or not." Skye put her hand on Ward's shoulder, almost as if she had forgotten to be angry with him. "I think it would be easier if every word he said was a lie, because then you just believe the opposite. There might be some accidental truth mixed in with the lies, but that doesn't mean you should start believing in horoscopes. Does that make any sense at all?"

Ward sighed, but it wasn't his usual tired-of-putting-up-with-you-amateurs sigh. It was a long, heavy exhale that left him just a little bit lighter. "Yeah, it kind of does."

* * *

"Can I take your blood?"

Ward was sitting at the conference table, putting some documents in chronological order. Something May Tripp had asked him to do. He turned to see Dr. Banner holding a handful of vacuum tubes. The guy was so mousey and quiet, Ward hadn't noticed him walk in.

"We, uh, we need fresh blood to serve as a control and it's not really a good idea to poke me with needles, so…"

"Sure." Ward shrugged. "Here or down in the lab?"

"Here's fine." Banner put the vacuum tubes down and began digging plastic-covered needles and iodine wipes out of his lab coat pockets.

Ward obediently held his left arm out so Banner could sterilize the crook of his elbow. "Any progress on figuring out what's going on with Skye?"

"Some. I think it has to do with spooky action, which is a sort of quantum Casamir effect decoupled from traditional lightspeed limitations on-"

Ward nodded at appropriate intervals, but unless 'spooky action' involved ghosts, he had no idea what Banner was talking about. Banner, for his part, was having a hard time locating Ward's vein.

"Give it here," said Ward, holding his hand out for the needle. "I can do it myself."

"Your hands aren't clean," said Banner, trying again. This time, the needle went in. Banner popped three vacuum tubes on in succession, each one filling with blood. "Can I take a fourth?"

"Sure."

"Thanks."

"I wanted to ask you," said Ward, as Banner was labeling the fourth vial, "you said you've got multiple personalities, but I heard the Hulk was the result of a science experiment accident." Ward actually had a lot of questions he wanted to ask Banner, about dissociation and self-control and having a monster inside of you. But this seemed like the safest starting point.

"The other guy has been around for a long time. The accident just gave him a physical body."

"So, where did he come from?"

"Well, that's a matter of some debate. I assume someday a history student and a psychoanalyst will team up and try to figure it out. What I do know is that I have a lot to be angry about, but for most of my life, I couldn't seem to get angry about anything."

"Mm?"

Perhaps Banner thought Ward was challenging him on his claim that he had a lot to be angry about, so he said, "My father tried to murder me and killed my mother in the process."

Okay, Ward hadn't expected that. Why wasn't that listed somewhere in the guy's SHIELD profile?

"The thing to realize about the other guy," continued Banner, "is that he's not really the other guy. He's me. Just another side of me."

"How can you be the same guy? I heard he barely understands language. Coulson brought you in because you're a science genius."

"He's stupid, but he's not mindless. We share most of the same likes and dislikes. He doesn't just destroy everything in sight."

"What does the Hulk like?" Ward sounded skeptical.

"He likes puppies," said Banner. "And he likes Betty."

"Betty?"

"Betty Ross. She was…uh…well, I like her too. She's also the daughter of General Ross, one of the assholes who's chasing you guys."

"Hulk likes her?"

Banner nodded. "Yes, but in a malignant sort of way. She's a biologist and when she lost her funding, he trashed the lab of a rival researcher. Another time, there was a fight and he got her away from the violence, but he put her in this cave. It was safe enough, but there was no way for her to get out. I don't know how they rescued her."

"So you and her…?"

Banner shook his head. "We talk on the phone sometimes. She's helped me with things, especially when I was on the run. She'd get me access to lab equipment or send me supplies." He smiled, his eyes looking affectionate rather than regretful.

Ward peeled back the gauze from his vein. It had stopped bleeding.

* * *

Ward took a seat in Coulson's office. "What if I go on supressors?" he asked without any preamble. Supressors were antiandrogen drugs, used by SHIELD for a variety of purposes. Amongst other things, they eliminated a man's sex drive.

"I didn't think your identity crisis had gone that far," answered Coulson. Antiandrogens were also used by transwomen to rid themselves of excess male hormones.

Ward couldn't see a point in answering Coulson's quip, so he just repeated himself. "What if I go on suppressors?"

"Why would you want to do that? I would think the side effects..." Suppressors reduced testosterone drastically. As a result, they caused the testicles to shrink in volume and the body to feminize. Men became impotent. They often grew breasts and hips.

"So you can take the shock collar off of my dick."

"If you go on suppressors, you won't be able to do anything that would activate the implant."

"I'd still prefer it."

Coulson furrowed his brow in thought. Finally, he said, "Well, I'd be inclined to grant your request, but I don't think we have any. We've been gathering medical supplies by raiding bases. Only the essentials. I doubt hormone pills were on the list."

To Coulson's surprise, Ward looked genuinely disappointed. If Coulson had been a betting man, he would have put money on manly-man Ward hating suppressors more than anything.

"Mr. Ward, do you understand why I requested that feature be included in the implant?"

"Because you wanted to ensure that I wouldn't...hurt Skye."

"You're not going to say the word?" Since Ward's allegiance had been made clear, Coulson had assumed most little quirks, like his bashfulness about sex, had been part of the ruse. Apparently not.

"I would never, never..." Ward trailed off, still struggling to actually give voice to the act in question.

"You understand why I'm hesitant to take you at your word?"

Ward nodded.

"For Garrett, you were willing to do things that were wrong."

Ward nodded again. "I owed him."

"If Garrett had asked you to hurt Skye, would you have done it?"

"No!" But when Ward thought about it, he wasn't sure. He wouldn't have raped Skye or murdered her even on Garrett's orders - he was sure of that - but he did handcuff her to a staircase. And capture FitzSimmons. And kill Eric Koenig. Those things hurt Skye. He did that. "I wouldn't have...I owed that man my life."

"Even if I accepted that premise, it doesn't follow that you owe him someone else's life."

"Do you know what I would have become without him?"

"No, I don't. And neither do you."

Ward sighed. It was one of those things that made perfect sense to him but he could never explain to anyone else.

"Let me ask you something, Mr. Ward. Why didn't you come to me earlier?"

"Hn?"

"You could have come to me. You could have told me about the hold he had on you. I could have helped you."

"You do know the whole 'I'm a social incompetent who needs your mentoring' thing was just an act to get on your team, right?"

"Was it?"

Ward's mouth twitched as if he were considering baring his teeth.

"You knew I had a reputation for being the guy who helps people out. That's why Garrett told you to try that ruse. So why didn't you come to me?"

"Why _would_ I come to you?" argued Ward. "I was following my mission. I was saving Garrett's life."

"Did it honestly never occur to you that your mission might be wrong?"

Ward was silent for several seconds. "I wondered," he began, "after Skye was shot."

"But then Garrett showed up right after," said Coulson with a tone that suggested things were following into place. "Did he threaten you?"

"What? No." Ward said this in an of-course-not sort of voice. "He just...reminded me."

"Reminded you of what?"

"That SHIELD plays favorites. That SHIELD might move mountains for some agents, but they abandon others to die. That he didn't send me here to get weak and soft."

"I don't approve of what was done to you and Fitz in South Ossetia."

"I know."

"And I don't think being part of a team makes you weak."

"I know."

They avoided each other's gaze for a few moments.

"I did," said Coulson. "I did bring you on the team hoping to 'fix' you. You had skills. You needed a context to apply those skills, not just tailing marks and taking them out. I hoped that working with a team over a long period of time would give you a broader sense of...what those skills meant, what they were for. And honestly, I got sidetracked. There was Skye. There was the whole Tahiti business. There were all these people who still think I'm dead, people who were suspicious that I wasn't myself." Coulson shook his head. "Do you ever think about how things would have been different if another agent had pulled you out of lockup?"

"No, I've never thought about that."

"Because you can't imagine any other agent who would."

"I'm not much of a daydreamer. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about things that aren't real."

Coulson nodded as if he had somehow expected that answer. "Supressors were a good idea, but I don't think you really want them, even if we had a supply. I'm going to allow Agent Skye to decide whether and when she would be willing to disable that function in your implant."

"Thank you, sir." Ward realized that he was being dismissed. He stood.

"Mr. Ward," said Coulson, "we've both made mistakes. Perhaps not the same mistakes, but mistakes. I was reborn. Maybe you can be too."


	8. Chapter 8

Placeholder because I made a numbering error and I don't feel like fixing it. If that bothers you, have a joke:

**You say 'hi' to the ocean. What does the ocean say back?**

**Nothing, it just waves.**


	9. For a pocketful of mumbles

"We're raiding a Hydra base," said Coulson. "We need two snipers providing cover, one on the north face and one on the west."

Ward looked at Coulson, said nothing.

Coulson held out a bulletproof vest. "I wish I could tell you to wait until you're ready for this. But we need intel from this base now and without you, we've only got one sniper."

Ward took the vest. "I thought you didn't want them to know I'm working for you."

"You'll be in the background. And we're all wearing masks."

That was almost funny. May was not going to be happy about going into a combat situation wearing a mask. "When do we leave?"

"0230. Middle of the night." Coulson lifted the case that contained standard-issue SHIELD sniper gear. He edged it towards Ward. "Are you ready for this?"

The look on Ward's face was impossible to read. "Yessir."

* * *

"I'm not just here for a visit, Fitz. I have something I need to tell you."

Fitz's eyes narrowed. He was obviously considering all of the dramatic and terrible possibilities.

"What's the last thing you remember before your injury?"

"We were being pulled to the Hub. And, and May had an encrypted line. And someone was firing on Garrett. And…and…something about Hydra."

Simmons nodded. "Do you remember what happened at the Hub?"

"That gets fuzzy. I know it was bad. There was shooting. We were trying to rescue you."

"And you did," she said, soothingly. "And we found out who the Clairvoyant was. Do you remember that?"

Fitz thought for a moment before shaking his head. "Was it Agent May?" He looked positively miserable at the prospect.

"No, she's on our side. It was John Garrett. He was the Clairvoyant. And he was working for Hydra."

"Garrett? So he's the one who did…?" Fitz gestured to himself, indicating the effects of his injury.

Simmons shook her head. "No, he had a…" She trailed off. "Fitz, you've been told this before. But you would get very upset. And then you would forget all about it, and you'd have to be told again, and you'd get upset again. We weren't trying to hide anything from you."

"Well, I can't say I'm happy about Garrett, but at least May wasn't involved with-"

"Ward," interrupted Simmons. "It was Ward. He was working for Garrett, for Hydra. He betrayed us. He tried to kill you and me. He's the one who-"

"No," said Fitz. "No!" It was almost a whine. "It can't be Ward. He wouldn't do something like that. He was our friend!"

"He wanted us to think that. He was a Hydra sleeper agent."

"No! That is just nonsense! That makes no sense at all! Ward worked with us. He protected us. He saved your life!"

"There's video evidence if you want to see. And he's confessed."

"No, I don't want to see some ridiculous video! I don't want to hear any more about this. I have a migraine. I'm sorry, this visit is over. I have a migraine and I want to just lie down in the dark now, please."

"Fitz, we're-"

"Please just go."

She left.

* * *

Ward was standing in the conference room. He could see Skye approach Simmons in the hallway.

"How'd he take it?" asked Skye.

"About as well as he did before."

They hugged. It was a long hug and Ward felt uncomfortable watching. He wondered exactly what they had told Fitz about his betrayal and he wondered why it was that Fitz had such a hard time accepting the information.

"Fitz is tougher than he looks," reassured Skye. "He'll bounce back."

Simmons glanced into the conference room, where Ward quickly looked away. She looked back at Skye. "I don't know how you can stand it," she said, "knowing what he did."

"Well," said Skye, "it's-"

"Good morning, ladies," said Triplett, walking past them into the conference room. He shut the door on his way in, so Ward could no longer hear what they were saying. He smiled pleasantly at Ward, as if they were just two agents, settling in for a briefing. "I heard you're running interference for our mission tonight." His voice was bland, neither accusing nor affectionate.

"Is that going to be a problem?"

Tripp held up his hands in a 'surrender' gesture. "Hey, as long as you're as good with a rifle as I've heard, it's all fine with me."

May arrived next – she acknowledged both men with a curt nod – followed by Coulson and Banner. When Banner went into the conference room, Simmons and Skye followed. Simmons had obviously been crying.

Banner tapped the main table, bringing up an image of a rotating 3-dimensional object with fuzzy edges. It looked a bit like an hourglass. He glanced at the assembled viewers and then looked back down.

"Agent Simmons and I have…uh…good news and bad…uh…news." He looked honestly hesitant to the be one to say something unpleasant. "If you look here, this is two natively intertwined sub-atomic particles. You can see that they balance each other's spin."

Ward couldn't really see that, but he nodded anyway.

"When we separate them-" Banner tapped the screen and the two halves of the hourglass slid apart. "When we separate them, action on one particle causes the opposite action on the other particle. This is established quantum physics, though we don't really know how it works. For one thing, the change in the second particle is immediate, which violates special relativity." Banner slid one of the particle diagrams up, which caused the other to go down. He spun one particle diagram clockwise, which made the other one spin counter-clockwise. Banner glanced at Skye, then at Simmons, before continuing. "We think that there are particles in Skye's body that have sub-atomic partners located elsewhere."

"So some of my, like, cells have evil twins?" asked Skye.

"Much smaller than cells," said Simmons. She had apparently collected herself; she no longer looked or sounded tearful. "We think these particles might be able to be used to gain control of Skye, alter her biology, or incapacitate her in some way."

"You said there was good news?" asked Coulson.

"We can't think of any conceivable way that these particles could lead to an explosion," said Dr. Banner. "Of course, this is really beyond known physics, so we can't rule out the possibility of-"

"Thank you, Dr. Banner," interrupted Simmons, with a discreet head-tilt toward Skye.

Coulson put both hands on the conference table, leaning in toward the particle diagrams. "How do we go about breaking the connection between the particles in Skye and their partners elsewhere?"

"That's the thing," said Simmons. "I don't think we can. This is working at a level of physics that mainstream science has yet to even approach. I think our only real option is to locate the other particles and take control of them, so they can't be used against Skye. Or us."

* * *

Ward went back to his quarters, only to find Skye in the little room, sitting on the floor with her laptop balanced on her knees.

"Come in, come in, shut the door!" she hissed as she waved him into his own room.

Ward sat down on the bed. "What are you doing in here?"

"Hiding from the science people. Now that they've got this theory, they're going to want to take more blood and do more scans."

"I didn't think that bothered you."

"It doesn't, normally. It's just that…maybe this whole thing is starting to freak me out a little."

"I pity the poor soul who tries to control you," said Ward. "Because I've tried giving you orders and it doesn't work very well."

Skye smiled. It was a thin smile, but it was real. She climbed up from the floor and sat down on the bed next to him.

As soon as he realized what she was doing, Ward stood up. The ceilings in the sleeping quarters were low, so this was even more awkward than expected.

"Are you okay?" asked Skye.

"Yes, I'm just…" God, Ward was going to start blushing like a middle schooler. He did not need Skye in his bed.

"I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable, Ward. Maybe I just need a hug right now."

Ward sat back down. Not right next to her, but only an inch or so away. He put his arm across her back and rested his hand on her shoulder. She leaned in.

"I mean, I feel human. I feel like I'm controlling myself. But what if that's just what they want me to think?"

"I don't know," said Ward. He was swaying very slightly from side to side and rubbing Skye's shoulder with his hand.

"And if they do find these other particles, it doesn't sound like they know what to do with them. Maybe Fitz would know, but he's- poor Fitz, Simmons said he was really upset."

"Yeah." Ward was glad Skye was distracting herself from a problem she couldn't really do anything about, but he didn't really want to be hearing all about the damage he had inflicted on Fitz.

"They're going to send him home to live with his mother in Scotland. They think he's done everything he can with rehab."

"Mmn."

"He can't really come back to the Bus. He's not smart enough for SciTech and he's not strong enough for Ops. I think Coulson would let him come back if he wanted to. He could, I don't know, wash dishes and do laundry. But I think that might be really depressing."

"Mm-hm."

Skye rested her head on Ward's shoulder and looked up at him. "I thought if I understood how all this happened, it would feel better, but it kind of doesn't."

"No," said Ward, "it doesn't."

* * *

"You asked to see me, sir?" The vest was off, but Ward still looked ready for a fight. His muscles were taut and the implant was reading an elevated heart rate.

"Take a seat."

Ward sat on the edge of a chair, elbows balanced on his knees. He rubbed his hands together like he was washing them.

"You killed a man today," said Coulson without preamble.

"I followed your orders to the letter." Ward punctuated his statement by pointing at Coulson and jabbing his finger at the air.

"Yes, you did. Does that make your actions right?"

Ward…wasn't sure how to answer that. "I did what had to be done."

"Why did it have to be done?"

"Because he had a detonator. Because he would have killed agents Skye and May."

"So you didn't do it to follow my orders. You did it because you were protecting your fellow agents."

"I'm not an agent," said Ward darkly. _And stop making up good motives for my actions_, went unsaid.

"Was there another way you could have handled the situation?"

"If I tried to take him hand-to-hand, I might have been able to subdue him without killing him, but there was a good chance he would have activated the detonator, killing two of ours. The risk wouldn't be justified."

"ICER rounds?"

"We have to conserve them. And they don't mark as reliably in those kinds of weather conditions. If I shot and missed, again: the detonator."

"Then you feel like you made the right choice?"

_Well, I didn't feel like I made the wrong one until you started asking me about it._ "How would you have handled it, sir?"

"How would Garrett have handled it?"

"He wouldn't have sent agents in. He would have gassed the place and picked it over once everyone was down."

"Do you think I should have done that?"

"Why are you asking me all these questions?"

"I'm gauging your ability to think for yourself."

Ward didn't like that. It made him sound like Garrett's slave instead of his makeshift son.

"This is difficult for you, Ward." Coulson looked like he was about to put a hand on Ward's shoulder, so Ward pre-emptively pushed backward into his chair. "This is difficult because for a very long time in your life, right and wrong were defined as pleasing and displeasing Garrett."

Okay, now _that_ made him sound like Garrett's abused wife. Ward definitely didn't want to listen to this crap. "I didn't have enough time to think through all of the possibilities. I considered three: using an ICER, taking the enemy combatant down hand-to-hand, and killing him. Only killing him had a reasonably good chance of preventing the deaths of Agent Skye and Agent May, so that's what I chose. I'm sure there's more ethics and philosophy that we could think about and discuss, but I only had a few seconds to make my decision, and I think I made the right one."

The left corner of Coulson's mouth turned very slightly upward. "For what it's worth, Mr. Ward, I think you made the right choice as well."


	10. Heaven holds a place for those who pray

_Grant sat on the floor of the living room, playing with a set of plastic farm animals. He was trying to set them up just like the picture on the box, but the cow and the turkey kept tipping over. He wondered if perhaps he should be wearing clothes, instead of just his Y-fronts, but just like it had been for the last several days, no one had told him to get dressed or picked out clothes for him, so he roamed around the house in his underwear, enjoying his reprieve while Maynard was at school._

_He was trying to wedge the turkey between two chickens so that it would stand up straight when someone sat down on the floor behind him. It couldn't be mom or dad or Maynard, because they wouldn't sit on the floor where he was playing. He turned around to look at the interloper. _

_It was her. It was Andrea. They must have let her go from the hospital. She was wearing her regular clothes and a blue plastic bracelet with letters on it. Blue was Grant's favorite color. She held out her arms, expecting him to run to her for a hug. He did not. Instead, he crossed his arms and put on his best mad face. "You were gone," he said._

"_I was," answered Andrea. "I was very sick. I had to go to the hospital. It took a little while for the doctors to fix me."_

"_Maynard said you were crazy and they were going to give you a straightjacket and lock you up forever."_

"_No," she said, "I would never let that happen."_

"_Did they give you a shot?"_

"_Yeah, a few shots. They had to look at my blood to see if there were any germs or poisons. And then they had to use a big straw to suck all the poisons out. They gave me medicine so the poison couldn't hurt me."_

"_Were you brave?"_

"_I didn't feel very brave. But I wanted to be brave for you. I forgot how to be brave for you, and I bet it was scary when I had to go."_

_Grant tipped his head downward. He played with his fingers. "I wasn't scared. Except a little because I didn't want you to be dead."_

_Andrea looked like crying, but there weren't tears falling out of her eyes. "Well, now I know I don't want to be dead either. The doctors helped me with that." She held out her arms again to show that she wanted to give Grant a hug._

_Grant folded his arms across his belly and lay face down on the floor. "Wanting to be dead is stupid!" He squirmed his arms out from underneath his body and kicked at the floor._

_Andrea crept forward and rubbed his back. "I love you so much. And I missed you so much. And I'm very, very sorry."_

_Grant's face was as mad as he could make it. It felt hot, and gross with tears and snot. "Well, I don't love you! And I don't missed you! And I'm not sorry!"_

_Andrea always had tissues. She cleaned her little brother's face. "Of course you're not sorry. You didn't do anything wrong. When someone says they're sorry, you say 'apology accepted'."_

"_It's not apology accepted! It's never apology accepted!"_

_She lays down on the floor next to him, gathers him into her arms, and sings to him about _Homeward Bound_ and _Mrs. Robinson_. She gives him the bath he obviously needs (even though he claims he had "a million baths" while she was in the hospital), puts a Band-aid over the cigarette burn on his back, and dresses him in clean clothes. She makes him a grilled cheese sandwich and they play whatever he wants for hours and hours. Eventually, the tears and rage stop and he's just happy to have his sister back again, but he never does say 'apology accepted'._

* * *

Ward scratched the back of his neck and glanced at the computer screen before turning back to look at Skye. "I don't think he wants to talk to me. If it were me, I wouldn't want to talk to me."

"I think that's up to him," said Skye. Her ambivalence was getting obvious. When it was just her and Ward, she could sort of understand how the guy had gotten so turned around that he was willing to do obviously wrong things in the name of serving Garrett. When she was faced with reminders of the obviously wrong things Ward had done, she had a harder time feeling forgiving. It would help if Ward actually showed normal human feeling about the whole thing, but he was still basically a robot weirdo. Sort of.

He actually looked like he was having some kind of feeling at the moment, though Skye couldn't hope to guess which one. She tapped at the keyboard. "All right, just click that icon there and it will open up the secure video link." She stepped back from the computer. "I'll just leave you to it, then."

"You're not going to stay and supervise me?"

"I've set it up so it can literally only do one thing. There's no way you can do something evil with it."

"Unless I traumatize Fitz."

"Well, you kind of already did that, so…" Skye shrugged and backed out of the room.

Ward scowled at the empty space where she had been. She wasn't wrong. It just wasn't what he needed to hear at the moment. Of course, who the hell cared what he needed to hear at the moment?

He scratched the back of his neck again. Suddenly, he really needed to take a piss. No, he didn't. He was just delaying. He imagined Fitz pounding on the door and pleading, the last moments before the pod was jettisoned from the plane. He thought about the way Garrett had coveted Fitz, a new engineer to add to Hydra's collection. He clicked on the 'connect call' icon.

There were a few seconds of lag before Fitz's face appeared on the screen. He looked…normal. His face looked completely normal. There was no sign of slackened muscles or unfocused eyes or a mouth that never quite stayed closed. It wasn't until he saw Fitz that Ward realized he had been expecting to see his younger brother's hemiparesis.

No, Fitz didn't look fucked up. He just looked…sad.

"Is it true?" asked Fitz.

"Uh, is what-?"

"Is it true, what they're saying about you? That you're a traitor?"

Ward paused a moment. When he spoke, he barely opened his mouth. "Yes."

"No," said Fitz. "You wouldn't do something like that. You were our friend." He sounded desperate, but a little weak, as though he already knew his arguments were hollow.

"I pretended to be your friend to gain your trust, so you wouldn't suspect me."

"If you're…if you're a traitor, why aren't you in prison?"

"I was. I was in lock up for a several months. Now I'm on house arrest."

"Simmons said you killed people."

"That's true."

"You tried to kill her! You tried to kill me."

Ward looked to the left. "I…hoped you would survive."

"Oh, well that's just wonderful, then! You had good intentions! You _hoped_ we would survive. You threw us out of a bloody plane!"

"Fitz, I'm s-"

"NO!" yelled Fitz, loud enough to make static on the audio line. "No, you don't get to say that!" He shook his head as if freeing it from something. "You do not get to say that. SHIELD was my whole life. I don't know how to live any other way. I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know anyone else. All I had was my work and Simmons! You've taken that away from me. It's gone. It's all gone."

"Fitz-"

"And for what? So you could make nice with some evil man? So you could be a part of, of Hydra?" He said the last word like it was some terrible disease. He sounded disgusted. "You knew all along who we were hunting, but you just-" He exhaled, a raspy noise. "It was all a lie, wasn't it? Was any of it true?"

"Most of it was true. It's a good idea to stick close to the truth when you're undercover."

"Undercover," echoed Fitz, with miserable irony. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. He looked tired.

"If I could…" Ward trailed off. He couldn't think of any ending to that sentence that didn't sound weak and childish. _If I could magically change the past…_well, you can't.

"I get migraines now. Did you know that? I never used to."

Ward nodded silently. He'd heard about the migraines, had hoped they were psychosomatic and would improve once Fitz adjusted to his new situation.

"Why are you even talking to me now?"

"Because I wanted to apologize."

"Well, that's just…that's bull shit, is what that is. You almost kill me and you think you're going to just say a few words."

Maybe it was the shock of Fitz swearing, but Ward felt like he was waking up. "No," he said, "no, I don't think anything I say will make you feel any better. It won't make me feel any better either. I just know it has to be said."

* * *

Ward climbed into the SUV passenger's seat, expecting to see Skye.

"Agent Skye is spending some quality time with the science club," said Tripp, "so I get to be your babysitter for the next few hours." He put the keys in the ignition. "Not that I don't mind the chance get off the bus for a few hours. I could kill for some fresh avocado."

"I'm pretty sure you can find all the fresh, locally-organic-free range-pesticide-magic-fairy-blessed avocados you want in Burlington."

"I don't know about you, man, but I don't eat anything that hasn't been blessed by a fairy. That's just common sense."

Ward smiled, if only slightly. Tripp was trying to keep things light, which wasn't a bad idea – it was just that Ward was feeling unusually shitty, a mood which was in no way improved by his disastrous videochat with Fitz. In fact, Ward was already putting quite a lot of willpower into not cancelling his plans to see his brother again.

"C'mon," said Tripp, as they pulled onto the interstate, "I'll let you pick the music."

"Thanks, but I didn't bring my mp3 player."

"Nah, Skye wired up this thing with everybody's playlists a few weeks back. We were on a stakeout and she got bored," he added, by way of explanation.

Ward felt this development was technologically impressive, though he was disappointed that Skye had not yet managed to scrape together the mental focus necessary to sit through an entire stakeout without reprogramming something. He nonetheless fiddled with the stereo (the controls were intuitive enough) until he found tagged playlists for each of the Bus's residents, himself included. (There were two playlists for Agent May: one labeled "pre-ass-kicking" and the other labeled "post-ass-kicking".)

Ward cued up his own playlist and was pleased to hear that it was nothing more and nothing less than all the actual music he'd kept on his mp3 player.

"This is really what you listen to?" asked Tripp.

"You got a problem with _The Rolling Stones_?"

"This is Garrett's music. Every song on here is something he listened to. Except maybe that _Simon and Garfunkel_ stuff." Tripp glanced at his passenger with his trademarked 'everything-is-just-a-little-fucked-up' look. "Every time I think I understand just how jacked he had you, there's a whole new level of it."

"It's just music."

"Yeah, but it's you copying him, right? Like how you both wear ugly-ass turtlenecks."

"Hmph."

"He never mentioned Hydra to me, you know? Or any of the others, as far as I know. So it's not like we all turned it down."

"You would've said no. You've got the whole _Howling Commandos_ thing."

"And you've got _The Rolling Stones_," answered Tripp.

* * *

"Abigail's covering a shift at the hospital," said Dana, by way of explanation, as he cut Chinese takeout into half-inch bits for the baby to eat. "One of her fwiends had an emergency woot canal or something like that. You still like chicken and bwoccoli, wight?"

"Yeah, this is great." Grant had been waiting for everyone to get food before he started to eat, though on reflection, the normal rules of politeness might be suspended somewhat when a two-year-old was in the mix. As it was, the child was using one hand to attach bits of food to his plastic spork before shoveling it into his mouth with the other. Grant watched the boy eat. He was careless, obviously used to plenty, and there was no tell-tale panic when he catapulted a spoonful of fried rice onto the floor. The boy was watching Grant as well, with a sort of benign curiosity that seemed more focused on the fact that Ward was using chopsticks than on the fact that there was a stranger in their midst.

"Gwant," said Dana, sitting down to eat. He pointed at Ward. "This is Daddy's brother. You call him Uncle Grant."

"Unka Gant," echoed the boy, through a mouthful of lo mein noodles.

Ward wasn't sure if he was supposed to say something to the kid. What was there to say? It wasn't as though they could chat about football or weather. "I can fly planes," he blurted out before remembering that impressing a two-year-old was neither difficult nor desirable.

Grant Jr. flung his arms out to the side in what was probably supposed to be a vague representation of an airplane and chanted, "Pilot! Pilot!"

"Oh, you have a winner with that one," said Dana. "He loves planes."

"I wanna see plane!"

"No whining at the dinner table."

Grant Jr. pouted mightily for a few seconds, then resumed eating rice three grains at a time.

Dana cocked his head toward his brother. "You weally a P-I-L-O-T?" he asked, the final word spelled so that the baby wouldn't get wound up again.

"I'm rated for certain aircraft. I don't have a lot of flight hours."

"I take it you don't work for Delta."

"No, I don't," said Ward, helping himself to more chicken and broccoli.

"But they have planes, the people you work for?"

The question hung in the air for a moment.

"Remember that concert we went to?" asked Ward, blatantly changing the subject. "You would have been ten or eleven. It was a couple of months before I went to military school."

"When we snuck out, went downtown, and stayed out all night?" Dana grinned at the memory. "Don't tell Abigail, but when she's out, I twy to get Gwant Jr. hooked on punk." He whispered conspiratorially: "I've almost taught him to thwow up the horns."

"That may have been the best night of my life." Ward took a long sip of his beer. "But we didn't really sneak out. No one was trying to stop us."

"I never did figure out where you got those tickets anyway."

"They were counterfeit. Friend-of-a-friend of Dad's."

"They were some tewwible seats."

"I know, right? You're going to print your own tickets, why not print good ones?"

"I just wemember sneaking down into the mosh pit. Which was a stupid idea. You got in a fistfight with some skinhead asshole."

"And you stole his flask while I was fighting him. We made a good team." Grant took a sidelong look at the baby, who was clearly done eating and was now experimenting with the viscosity of sweet-and-sour sauce. "You really play him _Offspring_?"

"I won't be able to do it forever, but he's just a little too young to wepeat it wight now. He likes it." Dana looked at his son and pumped his fist in the air. "Hey Gwant, wock on!"

"Rock on!" echoed Grant Jr., raising his hand in what might have been the index-and-pinky finger hard rock salute, but really just looked like he was trying to say something rude to a Vulcan.

"At least he's got good taste in music," said Ward.

"I know, Abigail plays him all this Lilith-fair cwap. I have to keep on top of it or this kid isn't going to have the fine musical education you gave me."

"I'm surprised you even remember that concert," said Ward. "We got pretty wasted."

"I know! I don't know what was in that flask, but we were so dwunk, we missed our stop going home. And then we twied to walk the west of the way, but that was a disaster."

"Hey, I'm not the one who can't walk straight sober," teased Ward.

"You put me in a shopping cart!" whined Dana, mock-offended.

"Got you home, didn't I?"

"That was a gweat night."

The brothers smiled, lost in the memory of it, as Grant Jr. tried to extricate himself from his booster seat.

It was strange and awkward, helping around the house, playing with his nephew until it was time to put him to bed. It was even stranger to see his younger brother as a father, responsible for this little life even weaker than he was.

Ward settled on the sofa in the den. His brother sat across from him. Dana seemed to know that Grant had something to say, something that shouldn't be said in front of a child.

"You gonna tell me where you've been?"

"I…really can't. At least some of it. It's classified."

"Classified? Like the CIA?"

"I can't tell you that part, okay? I just can't. I was a part of something. I was a part of two different things and one of them fell apart and there's not much chance I can go back to the other."

"Okay?" That didn't really clarify much.

"I've done some really bad things, Dana. I've killed people. A lot of people. I've hurt people, injured them, scared the shit out of them. I hurt a guy the way you got hurt – brain damage. I've lied a lot. Deceived people to get their trust just so I could keep moving or get information or just make sure they don't catch on to what I'm doing." Ward pressed his hands together as if he wasn't sure whether to pray or stretch his fingers. "I've hit women. I'm not proud of that. Sometimes they were fighting me. Sometimes they weren't. I sold drugs to an addict. I needed intel and he wanted to be paid in coke and god help me, that's exactly what I gave him. And there was this dog-"

"Gwant," whispered Dana. "This isn't confession. You don't have to give me a list of every bad thing you've ever done. I'm not going to assign you ten Hail Mary's. If you want to tell me this stuff, I want to listen. But maybe you should tell me one thing at a time."

Ward stopped kneading his hands together. He was holding them a few centimeters apart, trembling, tense and gentle, as though he were getting ready to catch something fragile. "Okay," he said softly, "okay." A tension left his posture, but it was replaced by weakness rather than calm. "I'm going to tell you about a woman named Victoria."


	11. There's a patch of snow on the ground

I was off this story while I handled some work stuff and other miscellany, but now I'm back and better than ever. Or at least back and still have an above-average* number of fingers. Anyways, this is a very short chapter to hold you over as I get back into the game. Remember, boys and girls, always fight fire with fire. Always fight water with potassium. Always fight wolves with the power of love.

* * *

The worst part about Hand's death was that it was so unnecessary. Ward might have needed to take out guards to free Garrett, but if he had planned it differently, timed it differently, Victoria Hand's life might have been spared. She wasn't a combatant. She could have been subdued. Hell, Ward could have stolen an ICER from the Bus as his backup weapon. But in the moment, when she suggested that Garrett deserved to die, that Ward should be the one to pull the trigger, tunnel vision kicked in and shooting her felt like the most natural thing in the world.

"_You sorry?" asked Dana._

"_Why does that matter?"_

"_It's what the pwiests used to say, isn't it? If you're weally sorry, God will forgive you."_

"_You always were big on religion."_

_Dana shrugged. "You don't have to think about it as a Jesus thing. Just that feeling guilty matters, I think. It counts for something."_

When Ward got back to the Bus, he lingered in the loading dock. There was always inventory to catalogue, clean, organize, prep. He had always liked keeping things neat. Garrett had been indifferent to his compulsive cleanliness, with the exception of periodic teasing. There were things Garrett had said that now, with distance, Ward could see were heavy-handed, crude, or manipulative. But there were other sorts of comments that were nothing more than the affectionate jabs traded among brothers, or at least, what Ward assumed loving brothers said to one another, based on what he'd observed in TV and movies.

"_This man, John, you lived with him for five years?"_

_It was hard to take apart what was classified and what wasn't. Sticking to first names added a basic level of anonymity. "Don't say it like that. I didn't _live with him_. I lived at his place. He wasn't there most of the time." At-his-place falsely implied a house even if it was literally true. Honesty was not Grant's forte._

"_It would be okay, you know. I know when we were kids, we called everyone fags, and said all kinds of shitty things. But I don't believe that stuff now." Dana paused, waiting for Grant to respond. When Grant remained silent, Dana decided to just ask. "Was John your lover?"_

"_No! I'm not- Jesus, Dana, it wasn't like that."_

"_I just wondered."_

"_I never felt like that, never thought about him in a sexual way. And I don't think he ever thought about me that way." If Garrett had wanted a sexual relationship, they would have had one. They never did, so Garrett must not have been interested. "But there was something…it wasn't a romantic thing, okay?" Grant inhaled once and exhaled once, slowly. "It was intense. Like when you fall in love and the other person is all you can see. You think about them all the time. They're a part of every stupid decision you make. And their approval means everything in the world."_

_Dana nodded gingerly. "I know the feeling you're talking about."_

"_He's dead now, John is. And everyone's happy about it. I should be happy. I'm free."_

"_Did John feel the same way about you? That intense feeling?"_

_Grant looked surprised, as though he had never considered the question before. "I was his favorite."_

_That wasn't an answer, so Dana just waited._

"_No. No, I don't think he ever did. I can't imagine him watching a movie and saying to himself, 'Ward would think that part was funny'." Grant looked away for a moment. "I know where you're going with this. You're going to ask why I was loyal to him if he-"_

"_I wasn't," interrupted Dana. "I don't weally need to ask."_

When Ward finally made his way back to his bunk, he was exhausted and hoping to fall asleep without too much miserable rumination.

So why the hell was Skye sleeping in his bed?

* * *

*See, you're a lot more likely to lose a finger than you are to have an extra finger, so the average number of fingers is probably something like 9.8. Thus, as a ten-fingered individual, I'm above average.


End file.
